India's top security official offered his resignation Sunday, a senior
aide said, as the government struggled under growing accusations of
security failures following the Mumbai attacks that left at least 174
people dead.

11/25/2008

Glenn Beck is so outraged by the bailout of banks that he wants conservative states to secede from the union:

So the question is, do states have the right to secede anymore? Because it was a compact. It’s not perpetual. In fact, in the Declaration of Independence it says it is our right, it is our responsibility to get away from a government who doesn’t listen to us any more.

Beck is not alone in his desire for patriotic conservatives to put an end to the vile United States. A couple of years ago, religious conservatives were getting ready to colonize South Carolina in order to avoid being exposed to sinful activities like gay marriage and Sean Penn movies.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the irony of self-declared patriots advocating the balkanization of the union, consider the sort of nation Beck and his righteous brethren would find themselves in if they were, actually, to leave.

Beck, of course, didn't enumerate which states he wants to take with him, so let's start with the working assumption that it would be those states that voted for John McCain in the last election. They can be assumed to be the last bastion of conservatism, just the kind of places Glen Beck wouldn't mind associating with, and by using them no one can accuse me of cherry-picking states to make my point. They are:

When Beck's done with his act of insurrection -- once they've burned all the American flags and surrendered their Social Security cards -- he'll be left with a country that has an awful lot of problems.

His new nation, separate at last from the liberal hell-hole he's so anxious to abandon, will contain nine of the 10 states with the lowest per capita gross domestic product and only one of the states in the top 10. While his conservative Utopia represents 32% of the electoral votes, it's only responsible for generating 26% of the nation's wealth -- and much of that is concentrated in Texas and retiree-intensive Arizona. Take those two states out and Beck's starting with an income base roughly 16% the size of the existing U.S. income base. That means there are an awful lot of poor people out there. In fact, they'll have eight of the 10 poorest states.

It will, however, enjoy the company of six of the top 10 states in rates of syphilis and gonorrhea. We'll see how abstinence-only sex education works on that.

Perhaps paradoxically, there will be an almost instant improvement of government services and decrease in taxes back in the liberal hell-hole, as the United States sheds some of its biggest deadbeats. Seven of the 10 states that draw the most from the federal government, relative to their tax
contribution, will become Beck's problem and not ours. Take Mississippi (please), which draws more than $2 in benefits for every $1 in tax it pays. Or model-of-rugged-independence Alaska, which snarfs down $1.84. Beck prefers those states to nightmarish Massachusetts, which makes do with $0.84 cents for every dollar paid. That tells me Beck has just the kind of math skills that are typical of his backward neo-nation. For the rest of us: All 10 of the states that pay the most federal tax and receive the least
payout in return will be left behind in the liberal hell-hole. They could drop their taxes an average of 25% and suffer no decrease in services.

The net result of canceling all that redistribution of wealth will be that Beck's poor nation will get even poorer, and the relatively rich nation against which he advocates treason will get even richer.

Ultimately, there's no better summation of the health of nations than life expectancy. Everything affects life expectancy, which is a broad, in-a-nutshell assessment of the success (or failure) of a society as whole. It is interesting to note that when Beck's Utopia launches, it's residents (not including the ones the government executes) will enjoy a slightly shorter life expectancy than the citizens of Uruguay.

Commercial flights leave the
Detroit airport several times each hour. They even have first class
seating. The point is, why does a failing business maintain a private
jet for the pleasure of the CEO?

My point is that private jets are not always maintained for the pleasure of the CEO. I'm not defending the contract clauses that give CEOs weekend, recreational use of corporate jets at no cost. I'm just saying that sometimes the use of private jets is a sound business decision.

Consider the cost of executive time. The CEO of GM got paid, last year, $8.5 million. Leaving aside the debate over whether anyone is worth that much money in general or whether the CEO of GM is worth that much money in particular, that means he gets paid $27,000 a day.

I've never met a CEO who travels alone, particularly on the way to Washington to testify before Congress. Let's also assume that he takes
with him a corporate lawyer who bills at $400 an hour and a couple of
high-powered gophers who make $400,000 a year each, which translates to
an entourage cost of roughly $7,000 a day. So, all in, the per day cost
of a CEO in the hot seat is something like $34,000.

The car caravan/publicity stunt currently under consideration would blow two, six-hour holes in the CEO's schedule over the course of three days. That's 12 hours of time, or roughly a day-and-a-half, when our $34,000 a day entourage is sitting in a couple of Buicks, rolling across Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Of course, they can talk and plan and do some kind of work during that time, but they're not going to be 100% effective. Let's say they're 50% effective; that means the opportunity cost of having them traveling like the rest of us is something in the range of $25,000. The cost of driving is a couple of hundred bucks, plus hotel rooms and late night Reuben sandwiches from room service, so the total cost -- out of pocket and opportunity -- for driving the CEO and his party to Washington is, say, $30,000.

Now let's look at the cost of operating a private jet. I've done a little web research and am going to assume a cost of $3,200 per flight hour. That's what the market seems to be for a middling private jet: something nice, but not anything the Sultan of Brunei or David Geffen would be caught dead in. Flight time from Detroit to DC is 90 minutes each way, which is three hours. Add some other charges -- landing fees, lunch for the pilots, that kind of thing -- and you're looking at a round trip cost of, say, $11,000.

Call it a half day driving to the airport and flying and all of that, which gives us a fixed time cost for the CEO and his entourage of $17,000. During that roughly half-day, I'm guessing the CEO et al can be more effective on the jet than they would be in a rolling Buick -- they've got phones and faxes and desks aboard the jet, after all -- but less effective than they'd be back in the office. Let's assume they're 75% effective. That lowers the entourage opportunity cost of taking the plane to $4,250.As calculated above, the plane itself costs $11,000, which means the total cost of taking the corporate jet is $15,250, or roughly half the cost of driving.

Now consider what will be known from now as the "Wally Construct." Wally wants them to fly First Class. OK, that's four round-trip tickets from Detroit to Washingon, presumably not purchased 30 days in advance and staying over a Saturday night. That comes to $1,300 per person, or $5,200 overall. The amount of travel time is less than driving but more than taking a private jet, and the productivity during that time goes down to close to nothing. Every time I fly anywhere I try to work on the plane, and I never get anything worthwhile accomplished. Also, a lot of the time is standing in lines and doing other things that make work impossible, so I'm going to assume zero productivity en route and three-quarters of a day pissed away. Our staff opportunity cost is pushing $25,000. Coupled with the $5,200 for tickets, out-of-pocket and opportunity costs for flying first class commercial are over $30,000, by far the most expensive option. (Commercial coach would be around $25,000.)

Again, leaving aside recreational junkets and flying the wife and poodle out to Palm Springs for (respectively) a massage and a trim, the use of corporate jets may not be the outrage or the indulgence people quickly assume.

I know we're supposed to be all scared and stuff that a couple of Russian cruisers are visiting oil-intoxicated basket case Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but when I saw this report I forgot all my fears and fixated on the snazzy graphic on the bow of the Russian ship. Very stylish!

CEOs of Ford, GM and Chrysler are being widely ridiculed for flying in private jets to plead for money from taxpayers, most of whom -- like me -- have never been inside a private jet. In response to that, this:

Things are getting so tough in Detroit that...the CEOs of the Big Three automakers were reportedly considering a
car caravan for their return to Capitol Hill in bailout negotiations.

While I'm all for symbolic gestures, I've got to believe the CEOs and their highly paid entourages have better things to do with their time than roadtrip across Ohio and Pennsylvania -- two states that I can say from experience are really, really long.

I'm all for symbolism and good PR, but let's look at this rationally. It's a little more than 400 miles from Detroit to D.C., so we're talking about taking critical players in a major national crisis out of their most productive mode for two full days -- one there, one back -- as opposed to maybe four hours on a plane. Is that smart? Of course not. It's a waste of critical time, but they're going to do it because we're in a populist lather.

Much as we all enjoy the image of GM's CEO bellying up to a urinal at a truck stop outside Aliquippa and having to stand in the cold wind at the self-service pumps, I'd really rather have him running a planning process, figuring how to save his company. It seems to me a private jet is a small price to pay for that.